Anti-Social Safety Net

Rob Christensen pens this article in the N&O lamenting the “fraying” social safety net in North Carolina due to the federal government shutdown reduction of 17 percent of its budget and paid vacation for thousands of federal bureaucrats.

Counties across North Carolina are facing difficult choices including the loss of money for subsidized child care, for feeding and nutrition programs for babies and their mothers, for child protection programs, and for money to pay social workers, officials said.

First off, the term “social safety net” needs to be scrapped in favor of a more accurate description. The government’s welfare state is funded by a system of forced extraction of the justly earned property of productive citizens. There is nothing voluntary about the relationship between those being forced to provide for the “safety net” and those receiving the benefits. Instead, thanks to the force of the government, charitable, mutually agreed upon cooperation between givers and receivers has been replaced with a system that pits givers and receivers at odds with each other, fostering resentment among givers because their ability to voluntarily exercise charity has been destroyed, and a hardened sense of entitlement among receivers in large part because they have no direct interaction or cooperation with the givers. All the while, this system is being administered by an army of government bureaucrats skimming administrative costs that would be unheard of for most private charities, and the centralization of the programs in Raleigh and DC removes the personal touch that would be the centerpiece of more localized voluntary charity. There is nothing “social” about the government’s “safety net.”

Commentators in the article express their concern about the federal government’s minor, temporary slimdown “creating havoc across the country.” But this is the result when you replace voluntary charity with a politicized welfare state. Politics will always stand in the way – such “havoc” is the expected outcome. Such commentators will never acknowledge this fact, however, instead they will just continue to demand more money for these programs and portray anybody who advocates for de-politicizing charity as “hating poor children.”

Of course, the reality is that left progressives like it this way. They know that the dependency created by such government “safety net” programs are a major source of political power, the destruction of civil society be damned.